View 552 January 5 - 11, 2009 (original) (raw)

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Still at the beach house. I am definitely going to get a swivelable monitor for use down here, but it will have to wait until I have another best seller (or at least good seller). The ViewSonic VA 1930 at 1440 x 900 is pretty nearly Good Enough for most of what I do. For keeping this place up I need the horizontal aspect since a lot of the work here is pasting mail and editing it, and I have to go to Firefox or Internet Explorer fairly often; web sites really expect you to be in landscape mode. But for writing stories and for that matter for reading on screen, what I need is about ten to twelve words a line and as many lines as I can get which means portrait mode. I can't leave my system set up here when we leave, so it all has to pack away into a closet; that also limits what I can use, and probably keeps me from having a 24" swivelable ViewSonic as recommended by Joanne Dow in recent mail, but we'll see.

I am definitely going to set up two monitors, one vertical, on my main communications system when I am back home; and I will look into whether a MacBook Pro can support two monitors, one vertical. Anything that increased productivity is worth considering as an investment, especially since the Republicans seem to have worked hard at wiping out much of my savings, and now the Democrats seem to be working harder to top their achievement.

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I have been reading Confessions of a SubPrime Lender, and I am horrified; apparently it wouldn't have taken much brainpower to determine that when Lehman Brothers brought Wall Street into the real estate business there was great potential for disaster, and that the ratings companies were in a bind: if they rated a package of junk at what it was worth they wouldn't get paid to do ratings any longer. What Lehman and the others wanted was AAA ratings for packages of mortgages so sliced up that it was impossible to determine what the actual risks were or even the ratio of loan outstanding to the value of the properties that were collateral for the loan; and when the AAA ratings started to flow, everyone wanted in the act. Those who smelt a rat were trapped: if you didn't get in on the deals, your return on investment was low compared to those who did get in on it. And you didn't dare say much about the insanity of it all lest you trigger the crash!

Apropos of that:

Atlas Shrugged...

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB123146363567166677.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

"'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years"

Charles Brumbelow

Atlas Shrugged shows capitalists overwhelmed by government regulators who don't understand how things work and eventually, which trying to assure fair play, make it impossible for the market to work. The referenced article above shows how we come closer and closer to that state every year.

Alas, a slave market shows where unregulated capitalism will go if left to itself.

For two thousand years political philosophers have known that good government consists of a mix, and that maximum freedom can only be obtained through mechanisms to assure that freedom. "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed,"

Apparently no one remembers any of this. Miss Rand didn't; her unregulated capitalists were still decent men and women, what a D&D master would call "Lawful good" alignment, and apparently the only "chaotic evil" people were bureaucrats and politicians, with government workers being at best "neutral, neutral." In the real world there are some very competent villains -- including, of course, politicians who have found it's the easy way to power without having to produce anything. But that's another story.

(And see next Monday's View)

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I would think that if you have set up a system to intercept messages and tell people they can beg you to let them send you mail which you may or may not deign to look at, you might, before sending out personal messages about your recent graduation or such to a list of people, put those people on a white list so that if they choose to congratulate you, they won't get that infuriating message about how in order to avoid spam... I suppose I am merely being curmudgeonly. I mean, some messages to a list of people aren't intended to generate replies, but some, with personal details, most certainly will. Ah well.

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About a decade ago, the Wall Street Journal has a story about a man who had spent 3 years in jail in India, awaiting trial on a charge of stealing from the government, to wit, riding a train without a ticket. The maximum sentence he could have been given was under a year. A year later the Journal ran an update: he was still in jail awaiting trial.

Comes now this: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24898119-29277,00.html

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